Dazzling Digital Art

This week I finished up my final project and got it ready to present next week. I created the final trailer, Powerpoint Pitch, and a pitch document for the presentation. I also made a Critter Cubes logo for the trailer and documents. Overall, I enjoyed creating this project in Unreal and had a lot of fun learning how to animate objects. My favorite part of this project was being able to create different worlds. I really like building out areas with assets and I hope to do it more in my career.   

  This week we did not have class because of Thanksgiving Break, however, I did work on my final project a bit. I added in the animated Critter Cubes into my scene. Then, I used the Critter Cubes, Cine Camera Actor, and Sequencer to create small scenes. The takes were then rendered out. I made 11 different clips in total which will be combined together to make a trailer. I also created music for the trailer. This week I hope to complete the trailer and begin working on the pitch presentation and the final document. 

  This week in class, I worked on the final project and completed all five of the worlds that I wanted to have for the trailer video. I decided to create five separate levels in order to showcase different environments of the game. Each world is created using a mixture of different free assets from the Unreal Engine marketplace. This week, I plan on creating the trailer using the Critter Cubes and animating them into sequences. 

For this assignment, I played the game "Le Morte D'Arthur" by Chris Crawford and listened to his legendary dragon speech. First, I played the game which took me most of the day to finish! Overall, I enjoyed the story. It reminded me of Twine games where it is text based and the players get to pick choices online rather than on a console. I liked that the experience had artwork on every page, however, you can tell that lots of them are AI generated. Some of the features, especially on the people, were a bit distorted. I do understand that this is a very long story and the amount of artwork if it was hand-drawn would have taken a while. I did see some hand-drawn images on some pages which was nice to see but I wish there was more of them throughout the game. I really liked that the choices were stylized as if you were responding as Arthur and that you could respond in different tones. The length of the game really surprised me. The passages were long and descriptive. It rem...

  This week in class, I worked on creating the maps for the final project. I created parts of the world that I would like the Critter Cubes to live in. I started with the village house above and I would like to create that into a party scene with more food on the table and decorations in the background. I would also like the Critter Cubes to jump around the table. I also worked on planning the other scenes and what shots I would like to take with them. 

  This week in class, I finalized and presented the pitch for our final project. My final project will be a trailer for my original game "Critter Cubes: Potion Pursuit." I plan to have multiple scenes displaying the characters I bought from the Unreal Marketplace. I would like to implement the characters walking across different worlds in the scenes and have a final party scene to showcase the game. Although no gameplay will be implemented, I still think that I will be able to show what the game could look like in an open world format. 

  This week in class, I worked on my pitch presentation for our final project. I finished up the first map that I created last week, and I began deciding on the title for the game. I have decided to call the game Cube Critters: Potion Pursuit because it centers around cube shaped animals that are searching for potions to get back to their home world. I also made some decisions on character names and what I wanted the key game aspects to be. At the end of the week, I continued the powerpoint presentation for our pitch next week. 

  This week in class I began the next project which is to make a game sequence with animations in Unreal Engine. I spent a lot of time looking at the Marketplace and searching for ideas. I found these adorable little creatures that inspire me from a pack called KUBIKOS made by ANIMMAL Game Assets. It is paid content but within my budget so I decided to purchase it and use other free Marketplace items for the worlds I want to create. I feel very inspired by these little creatures and I hope to create a game idea in an open-world format.  I started on a forest type world with a waterfall as shown above. 

  This week in class, I focused on compiling my work for my midterm presentation. I created this powerpoint using a template on Canva to showcase the work I have done so far this semester. Each slide shows what I accomplished week by week. It also shows the work I completed with the Unreal Fellowship. Personally, I really like my multicamera sequences and the new world I am now creating and trying to expand! I am proud of what I have accomplished so far and I hope to continue to learn and grow. 

  This weekend, outside of class, I practiced creating an animation sequence of a character waving. I don't have much experience with animating a character and this is the first time I was able to animate a character successfully without it looking too janky or having the keyframes move too fast. I followed along with some more of the Unreal videos as best as I could. Although the fellowship videos are hard for me to understand, I feel proud of the work I have done so far on my own, since animating is not my strongest skill. I feel proud of the progress I have made so far with animating. I also continued to work on my midterm presentation and getting everything together on Dropbox. 

  This week in class, I focused on creating a new map with the same assets as the multicamera sequences. This time however, I worked on making the world a lot bigger and more detailed. I watched some of the Unreal Fellowship videos and tried to animate a figure, but was not very successful. Animation is not my strong suit. Moving forward, I want to try to make a longer cinematic flyover with the cameras in Unreal. I also finished the Animation Fellowship Week 1 videos. I also began preparing for the midterm and started on my presentation and documenting everything I have done so far. I started creating a Canva presentation and compiling the work that has been completed so far. 

  This week in class, I worked on keyframes and multicamera sequences in Unreal. I learned how to use and export multiple cameras in a scene using different angles. In the video above, I used Cesium Ion (which I learned how to use in another class) to go to Mount Fuji in Japan. I then made three different camera views and exported it. I also created two more sequences with a world that I designed myself using a pack from the Unreal marketplace.  I also continued with the Unreal Fellowship videos and got through the Introduction to the Control Rig video. Once again, I found these videos pretty difficult to understand and I feel like they are geared more towards professionals who are more experienced in the industry. I have never used Unreal before and these videos feel a little overwhelming to me. I tried my best to follow along but struggle as animation is not my strong suit. 

This week outside of class, I worked on creating sequences within Unreal. I used Cesium Ion to plug in Google Maps and create flyovers of Tampa and Tokyo. The cameras are a little wonky in the videos, but I am going to work on making the animations smoother. In the Tokyo video, the camera spins around aggressively and I believe I figured out why. When moving on the Z axis, the camera quickly has to make up for the track it hasn't been on, so it abruptly moves. I am going to test out ways to fix this in the future. 

  This week in class, I worked on learning how to create keyframes and animations within Unreal Engine. Using sequencer, I was able to create this small keyframed animation of one of the Unreal Engine test files. It is not perfect and meant to be longer, but it is progress with animating objects in Unreal. I also watched the first few videos within the Unreal Fellowship. I watched up to Transitioning to Animation in Engine. I found these videos to be hard to follow and understand, but I tried my best.

 This week outside of class, we were tasked with watching the "Secrets of Blackmoor" documentary. Personally, I felt a little disappointed by it because I really wanted to know more about the group's legendary D&D campaign that lasted many years. They mentioned it only a few times in the documentary and I was very interested in the first and longest lasting campaigns. Most of the documentary consisted of how D&D was created by combining popular war games and adding roleplay aspects to them, which is interesting, but I wish they hadn't spent so much time in the logistics of it. I wanted to see how the first players and DMs created their characters and storylines, and how they played the first games of D&D. The documentary included really cool titles for some of the people like "World's First Bard" and I really wanted to know how that came about and the stories behind the creation of bards and other races. Although the war games were fundamenta...

  For the first week of class, I made and played my first Giantlands character. She is a Gatian named Scrap. I created a drawing of Scrap using Procreate. It was very interesting playing with my classmates and seeing what characters they made. Interacting with everyone in the game showed how we can work together as a class to build an interesting story.